Bill Clinton: Fiscal Cliff Fighting Just 'Kabuki Dance'

Former President Bill Clinton said Wednesday that the “American people are going to be sick” while watching the public debate over how to avoid the fiscal cliff, but that a deal will definitely be worked out.

The Sacramento Bee reported that Clinton implied a deal was in the works and that the automatic tax hikes and cuts to the military wouldn’t just happen on Jan. 1, no matter if it looks that way.

“It's just a Kabuki dance," he said at a speech in Sacramento, Calif. "They're sort of like two dogs that meet each other over a piece of meat. They're sniffing each other out. They are moving toward a deal. That's what's going on."

Clinton also said that he’d probably still sign legislation repealing the Glass-Steagall Act at the end of his presidency, despite it allowing banks to reach sizes they had not seen since the 1920s.

The law originally was enacted to keep banks from growing too big, or doing too many things, so that the failure of any one of them could not bring down the economy as it did both in 2008 and at the start of the Great Depression in 1929.

“The general assumption that Glass-Steagall had something to do with this is wrong," he said, adding that the problem was unregulated financial derivatives, which he expects Congress would have prevented him from doing anything about.